


ruins

by khirimochi (NekoAisu)



Series: dust to dust [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Accidental Grave Robbing, Action, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Blood and Injury, Character Death, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Immortality, Immortals, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Male Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Named Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Original Character(s), Past Relationship(s), Possession, Specific Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, but it's really WoLs are minor divine beings within FFXIV universe, part one of the "g'raha accidentally gets a god for a boyfriend" trilogy, the main death and implied death tags all apply
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:21:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27856673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NekoAisu/pseuds/khirimochi
Summary: Eventually, it ends. Quiet just like how it was when they met.
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch & Warrior of Light, G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light, X'rhun Tia/Warrior of Light
Series: dust to dust [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2039313
Kudos: 2





	ruins

**Author's Note:**

> Revelation 21:3  
> And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God."
> 
> im sorry to anyone who reads this expecting it to not be full of blasphemy and nonsense pacing. i wrote it between the hours of 1 and 2:30 am like a man given visions (or worms off the string). bone app the teeth. 
> 
> [Fahmi pics if you are so inclined](https://twitter.com/i/events/1250252460381351936?s=20)   
>  [And quick refsheets if you're not one for scrolling](https://twitter.com/khirimochi/status/1322018798136905728?s=20)

It ended the way all things do. Quietly. 

He isn’t used to care and perfect keeping. The glancing blows made to whittle his opponent down test his control. If he missed by an ilm, was ever so slightly too far off his mark, it would be his fault. 

The chatter of spirits in his ears is all truth. 

(─ _ and it would be so easy to kill him. Would that he was meant to be ran through, divine forgery rending soul from flesh, and not laid to rest like some sort of misguided hero _ ─)

It will be his fault, no matter what, because he is why X’rhun has to die.

He takes little joy in his dominion. What use is a kingdom of bones when all he wants is to avoid it?

X’rhun looks at him, looks  _ through  _ him, and he realizes that he is not fighting someone he knows.  Whoever _ Whatever  _ is in there is not his friend or companion. It swings at him, careless of how blood has turned his white coat red (and he still remembers the day they’d finished making it, laughing over how the stitches he had sewn around the pocket were more uneven than a faultline) and  _ howls.  _

Whatever is in there is deserving of death and, for the first time in what he knows is more than a thousand thousand years, Fahmi is happy to have his dominion. There is no one more fitting to see this perverted creature to hell than he. 

No one else has so true a grip on the living. 

He continues their dance, though. For every one swing from X’rhun─the  _ creature,  _ he has to remind himself─he returns it threefold. He never misses. 

Eventually, it ends. Quiet just like how it was when they met. 

His ears ring. 

“Why?” he asks, knowing there will be no answer from the twisted soul trapped within his beloved’s body. He looks down at him as if the uneven pattering of his heart is liable to give some clues where it glows within his chest. 

The spirit spits at him, cursing and growling without using lungs or mouth, and Fahmi reaches into the space between body and soul to tear it free by force. He can feel it coalesce in his palm until he can get enough of a grip to  _ yank.  _ Had he any care left for the mortal body (he does. Even seeing it makes him want to tear his own form to tatters), he would have been more gentle. 

But X’rhun is not there, anymore. 

He looks at the spirit clutched in his hand and frowns, centuries of bitterness conveyed in the thin, nearly knifelike curve of it, and crushes down upon it until he can hear it wail. The solidness of its temporary form begins to quake before shattering like mortal bones do beneath his blows. 

There is no place in the Lifestream for fragments of a whole. 

Shifting his focus, he can only see red. Red on his hands, on his face, on his lips, coating his tongue and making his palms sticky where they press reverently against what’s left of X’rhun’s body. He hadn’t been there to bury him, but he knew who did. 

That he would be here and in such a state tells him that she is no longer among the living (that, or managed to make it out alive. He refuses to ponder on alternatives). His friend and odd daughter, that Arya. The one he had said would one day pull stars from the sky because it pleased her to see them shining. 

There is no way she is gone. 

He looks down, blind to color and drowned in it all at once, and carefully scoops the body into his arms. He wishes it wasn’t so cold. 

(It feels like their first night together but reversed, warmth and intoxication replaced by the heavy taste of iron and a too-cold cheek resting against his shoulder. What he would not give to go back.)

He digs another grave. He makes another rough headstone. 

He’s never had any skill with this “burial” business. 

When it’s all over, the last scraps of missing fabric and shattered metal picked up and tucked away for safekeeping, he finds a spot to sit down and decides that he will not move. Not for a while. 

The sun sets and rises again. He watches the days turn to weeks and then weeks to months. Sand piles up. He sweeps it away. Snow piles up. He packs it out of the way. The headstone cracks and this time he spends a week trying to learn to chisel just to get the odd Eorzean characters to some level of legibility before replacing it. 

He spends a century there. Waiting. Watching. 

The city that once was so far away has expanded and travelers ask if he stays there in the ruins (his home. The one he has let fall into disrepair). He always says that he is alright and warns them of dangerous weather like he does not always know if they will make it to their destination alive. 

Someone new comes by after a tough winter and Fahmi looks at him like he’s an affront to nature. His soul is fractured, a fissure splitting it down the center in red and turquoise, and he has no death date. There is no ticking clock or fading energy. He has no fraying edges. 

“Afternoon!” the odd traveler calls. “Do you happen to know the quickest route to the next city over?”

Fahmi blinks. “No.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t leave this place,” he says, legs crossed and dead leaves piled up around him. “You should, though. You have a long life ahead of you, G’raha.”

The traveler looks at him like he’s grown another tail. He knows better than to do that after it had made X’rhun laugh about his horridly misshapen mortal form, but he tries to discreetly check just to be sure. 

“How… do you know my name?”

He opens his mouth before logic can get the better of him and says, “I know everyone that lives and has lived in my domain.”

G’raha crosses his arms, travel pack making the pose seem more uncomfortable than accusatory with how the straps make his coat wrinkle to the seventh hell, and says, “You make it sound like you’ve been around  _ forever.” _

Fahmi glances over to X’rhun’s grave. He sighs. “Too long, but not forever.”

“How old are you, anyways?” G’raha asks, wandering over and shrugging off his pack. He squints like scrunching up his nose and eyes will somehow help his flawed mortal vision. It makes him look like… he doesn’t remember what. It’s been too long. 

He tries to recall what it was, but all he comes up with is small, soft, and tailed, but he has no face or name to put with the concept. 

“You can’t be over  _ thirty,”  _ G’raha muses, snapping him out of the beginnings of panic. “You don’t have any wrinkles. Though, you, uh… look rather upset all the time. You might look younger if you don’t frown so much.”

“I don’t frown.”

“Yeah, you do.”

He frowns sharply and G’raha looks so  _ smug  _ about it. “I was not frowning before,” he says, acting as if the traveler is just a child to be corrected and not a grown man searching the world for some unknown purpose. “This is a frown─” he lets his expression ease back to normal “─and this is not.”

G’raha hums, rocking back on his heels before plopping down and mirroring Fahmi’s posture, ankles crossed over the thigh and back straight (or… vaguely straight, in the mortal’s case). “If that’s not a frown, then I’m not a Miqo’te.”

“You are not a Miqo’te, then.”

His reply gets him a laugh, sharp and amused with that same undertone of surprise he hadn’t even realized he missed that acutely until it was back to taunt him. “Don’t do that,” he orders, forgetting himself and his identity as a hermit-of-sorts as his eyes flash bright white as if responding to a threat. 

There is nothing tangible there to harm him. He cannot remove his own heart. 

(And he has tried.)

G’raha startles, tipping over onto his back with a squeak. He unfolds his legs and rights himself before gaping. He opens his mouth and closes it at least three times in quick succession before managing to settle on words. He does not sound the least bit terrified when he states, “You’re not mortal.”

“Leave me─”

“So you can continue to sit here overnight and be all old and broody? I think not,” he interjects, turning his nose up at the notion. “I have  _ so  _ many questions and you can probably answer a lot of them. I’ll just stay the night here and then head out at mid-morning.”

“Midnight.”

“Dawn.”

Fahmi looks at him and his proffered hand. “Why are you doing that?”

G’raha looks down at it and then back at him. His tone edges on incredulous when he says, “We’re making a deal?”

“A covenant?”

“Uh… sure,” he agrees, holding his hand out further. Fahmi barely resists the urge to slice it clean off for being anywhere near his body, much less his soul. Gods don't dare touch each other's souls, not even Hades, the god of Death in all its forms, would dare do that. For a mortal to even _hint_ at it is enough to makes his hackles rise. 

He takes G’raha’s hand gingerly and only touches it as long as is absolutely necessary before heaving a great sigh. The land rumbles with him, settling down for the evening and beginning to slip from afternoon birdsong to the chirp of crickets and the shifting of Gyr Abanian sand. He closes his eyes. 

Something lands in his lap. 

He cracks one eye open and looks at it. 

“I do not know any written word.”

(Yet another thing he’s forgotten.)

G’raha laughs again. His mind conjures images of how X’rhun’s eyes would crinkle and his laughter lines kept growing deeper and he’s only left a scant few decades before─ “Hey. Are you alright?”

Fahmi picks up the notebook and is very careful not to crush it. He places it on the ground as far away from himself as he can manage. 

“No,” he says, and it is not an admission. He has never been able to lie. Arya used to say he was too nice to spare her feelings. 

He wonders if she was ever buried. He is too late to check.

G’raha picks up his notebook and flips it open, paging through treatises and debate outlines before finding whatever he is looking for. He flips it around and holds it out, corners of the parchment pages stained and uneven from wear. 

It’s a sketch of something Fahmi recognizes, if only from somewhere far away from his body. 

“How do you have that?” he asks, and it feels like his mouth is moving independently of his brain. He’d taken care to hide all that could have been found from that time.

“A dig. You see, NOAH has been working on recovering artifacts left behind from the Age of Twelve and we─”

“Desecrated a grave.”

G’raha looks at him with that same puzzled expression he had earlier before grimacing. “That… we weren’t aware, at the time. We only learned after we were more than halfway through. There was no body and the crypt─wait.  _ Wait.  _ You said you don’t leave here but you  _ knew─” _

Fahmi stands, all five-and-some-change of him attempting to loom and somehow succeeding (even if just by sheer spiritual pressure), and picks him up by the collar. He grabs his bag with his free arm, hefts the both of them, and walks them out of the ruins, heedless of G’raha’s questions and attempts at resolution. 

“Get out,” he growls, and there is a sharpness to his teeth that he has gone so long without that it nearly feels foreign. “Get out and don’t come back.”

G’raha looks at him, feet kicking at the air, and says, “I can’t go anywhere if I can’t even reach the ground.”

Fahmi drops him like he’s barely a step above a particularly disinteresting rock. “Leave,” he orders, eyes narrowing and tail thumping against the ground like a war drum. 

“But I─”

_ “Leave!” _

Whatever he did (whatever he  _ was)  _ seemed to be enough to force some sense into his tiny, mortal head. G’raha grabs his pack by one well-worn strap and retreats like his feet are on fire. If he comes back, leaving with just that would be a mercy. 

How he has a detailed sketch of the ring Fahmi has made is beyond him (too obvious). It should never have been taken from its resting place among the ashes of all those that X'rhun had buried years before they had even met. He wants to rend the entire world in half just to make his heart stop feeling like it's being squeezed in a vise. 

He does not stay to ensure the traveler (archaeologist, treasure hunter,  _ blasphemer)  _ is well and truly gone. 

It is the first of many mistakes. 

**Author's Note:**

> please cry with me on twitter or discord where i post 394563453 screenshots of x'rhun a day
> 
> [FFXIV Haven Discord Server](https://discord.gg/NCdmRHf)  
> Twitter [@khirimochi](https://twitter.com/khirimochi) OR [@TheHolyBody (NSFW)](https://twitter.com/TheHolyBody)  
> 


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